Against denial. Against fascism. Against climate nonsense, racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, and anti-intellectualism.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Idiot comment of the day: homegrown edition

We must be coming up in the world. We have a local winner. I'm so proud:

Anonymous said...

Any real proof that there's any 'real' danger in warming?

Been warming a long time save for a couple of tiny ice cold times that some GW "scientists" tried to DENY, since the last big ice age, still have some ice year round, so to me still have some warming to go. That's how it works, like a pendulum from thousands to millions of years long.

Carbon? Pfft, treat it as a offending or toxic 'pollutant' ? Plants eat this stuff!... whatever but it's not a forcing factor on the climate systems - it's just too puny.

Oh and hate to break the news to you - your golden CO2 egg is easily proven to be ponzi scam as more and more people are able to explain rationally why it's not science, not true and not credible.

Warming is a good thing, I wish we were, instead we are a bit cooler and we're noticing.

Here in Can, already have short summers, we notice, we note the extra harsh winter of late in our extra expensive hydro/heating bills and I personally - hate the cold. Cold kills life more than heat.

Nothing grows on ice, life however sparce exists in deserts.

Anyone not questioning this is being lazy intellectually. You have to question this or somewhere along the way you were taught not to think logically.

Sad that so many won't have the needed discussions about this 'settled' science approach to begin with.

Settled science on tiny bits and pieces that are just being discovered - considering the subject - earth sciences?

Says who?

You're going to let some group of scientists led by experts like Al Gore - no matter who else they are - say they "know all" there is to "know" about our whole climate systems and can predict the weather outcome in the far future?

What happened to real science?

So what are the fallacies here, and what are the rhetorical strategies used to conceal them?

First, you have a denier who is either bluffing or believes they are scientifically literate -- and is thus a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others" (p. 1127).

CO2 of course, is not "puny" in its effects, the poster has no idea "how it works" but invokes vague "cycles" which they do not understand enough to know that "cycles" are not a explanation for anything, let alone the very un-cyclic response of the climate to anthropogenic interventions.

We have the old denier canard that "CO2 is plant food" and therefore, magically, you can never have too much CO2; CO2 can never cause you a problem. Skeptical Science's takedown is here.

Al Gore, that hoary old bogeyman, is in there too: "You're going to let some group of scientists led by experts like Al Gore - no matter who else they are . . ."

Gore, of course, never claimed to be an expert, and is not "leading" scientists. He did manage to do very successfully, to the tune of $50 million in ticket sales, what many non-scientists have tried to do from the "skeptic" side: he explained the issues in lay terms, persuaded others to share his concerns, and presented a political plan of action. For this, the "skeptics" will never forgive him. Anyone associated with Gore in any way, we are asked to conclude, must be bad and untrustworthy. Which argument might have someone like Anders Behring Breivik nodding along, but is hardly convincing otherwise.

Sometimes I really wish "skeptics" would get in the habit of citing their sources. Who said that? Nobody. We know enough to make some hard choices, we know a lot, in fact, but there's a lot more to know. We will never know everything. We don't know everything about heart disease, or strokes, or cancer, but we know enough to say "You probably shouldn't put that tobacco or its smoke in your mouth or your lungs."

The poster goes to say . . . well, maybe someone can explain to to me:

Here in Can, already have short summers, we notice, we note the extra harsh winter of late in our extra expensive hydro/heating bills and I personally - hate the cold. Cold kills life more than heat.

Nothing grows on ice, life however sparce exists in deserts.

Anyone not questioning this is being lazy intellectually.

Apparently the poster has confused science with alchemy (a common problem in people who know nothing about science yet are persuaded they know far more than all those fancy scientists with their la-dee-da "high school diplomas") and seems to be claiming a mystical connection between heat and life, and cold and darkness and death. Hence, we should welcome global warming. It's climate science according to The Silmarillion.

I, for one, would not want to be thought "lazy intellectually," and I hope the poster and like-minded "skeptics" will return often to entertain us with their wit and insight.